An Introduction to the New Testament

XIII

THE FIRST COLLECTION OF PAUL'S LETTERS

The Pauline corpus. Luke-Acts stands forth as a great missionary record. It is the story of the Greek mission. It carries the reader straight up to the martyrdom of Paul but with great restraint stops short of narrating it, while unmistakably forecasting it in the underscored presentiments of his farewell to the Ephesian elders. Acts 20:25, 38; 21:13. It must have greatly revived and stimulated interest in the figure of Paul, which was already beginning to disappear into the past, as all figures inevitably tend to do. But with all his interest in Paul and admiration for him, Luke has no acquaintance with his letters.

It is sometimes maintained that, if he had been with Paul, he must have known the letters he wrote. But this is to forget that writing letters was the least of the activities of the living Paul. They were simply incidents in his busy life of effort and movement. Paul's conversation, his preaching, and his journeys would be much more outstanding features of his in the eyes of his personal companions and associates. Nor were the letters we possess written during the periods when Acts represents Luke as being with Paul. Moreover, Paul's letters were all addressed to immediate

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local situations, and with the passing of each of these the interest of the letter concerned with it naturally evaporated. This is the explanation of the fact that the gospel literature we have thus far surveyedMark, Matthew, and Luke-Actsshows no influence of Paul's letters.

But from this point on the situation is reversed. Every Christian document shows acquaintance with Paul's lettersthe Revelation, Hebrews, I Clement, I Peter, the letters of Ignatius and Polycarp, the Gospel of John. This is, in fact, the key to the later literature of the New Testament; it is all written in the presence of the collected Pauline letters. Over against the total nonacquaintance of the earlier evangelists the difference is positively glaring. Before the publication of Luke-Acts nobody knew them; after the appearance of Luke-Acts everybody knows them.

And not just one or two of them, or three or four. Almost the first book to show acquaintance with them is the Revelation of John, written by the prophet of Ephesus in exile on Patmos. His book is so swayed by the newly published corpus of Paul's letters to seven churches that he actually begins his book with a corpus of letters to seven churches. If any literary resemblance could be more striking and massive than this, it is difficult to imagine what it would be. Yet students of the Revelation have been so engrossed in its apocalyptic atmosphere that this obvious fact about it, which strikes one in the face on the first page, has actually escaped their attention.

But it is most unnatural for an apocalypse to begin

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with a letter, still less with a corpus of lettersseven letters, in factand these letters addressed to Christian churches. Can this possibly be dismissed as coincidence? Not when we observe the further fact that the Revelation corpus is not a real collection of letters that have been sent to their several readers; the collection is avowedly a literary device, and all the letters go to all the churches. It is no actual collection of letters once sent and later collected that meets us in Revelation, chapters 1-3. The letters are written as a collection and made to form the portal of the Apocalypse, and the whole work is sent to all the churches in the list.

We cannot suppose that this artificial corpus of letters preceded the actual gathering-together of Paul's letters scattered among seven churches. It is clear that the real collection of letters to seven churches must have preceded the artificial one, which was simply an imitation of it. Indeed, if the Revelation had been discovered yesterday, instead of having been familiar to us all from childhood, this fact would have been at once apparent and would have been everywhere recognized. The portal of the Revelation was suggested by the recent appearance of a collection of Paul's letters to seven churches. Even the salutation of 1:4, "Blessing to you and peace," is the characteristic Pauline letter salutation, unknown elsewhere in the New Testament and strange to Greek epistolary practice.

It is important to observe the extent to which the letters of Paul are reflected in the literature immediately

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following Luke-Acts, and perhaps the accompanying tabular view will make this clear.

Rev.

Heb.

I
Clem.

I Pet.

John

Ign.

Poly.

Jas.

Mar-
cion

Pas-
torals

II Pet.

Eph

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Romans

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

I Cor.

X

X

X

X

...

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

II Cor

X

...

X

X

X

X

...

X

...

X

X

X

Galatians

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Philippians

X

X

X

X

...

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Colossians

X

X

X

...

...

X

X

...

...

X

X

X

I Thess

X

X

X

...

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

II Thess

X

...

...

...

X

X

...

X

...

X

X

X

Philemon

X

X

...

...

...

X

X

...

...

X

X

X

This table owes much to the one prepared by Dr. A. E. Barnett in his elaborate study, "The Use of the Letters of Paul in Pre-Catholic Christian Literature" (p. 612). [1] The conservative character of his results is shown by the fact that he lists as reasonably certain the use of only five Pauline letters in II Peter, and yet that epistle speaks of "all his letters," regards them as Scripture, and laments the heretical (Marcionite) misuse of them, so that its author quite certainly possessed all ten. McNeile quotes Turner as saying that the Epistle of Polycarp is "crowded with indubitable echoes of at least eight" of Paul's letters, but this includes I and II Timothy, which Turner thought were quoted; the others are Romans, I and II Corinthians, Ephesians, II Thessalonians, and Philippians. [2]

[2] Introduction to the Study of tit New Testament (Oxford, 1927), p. 315.

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It is customary to explain these facts by the supposition that different collections of Paul's letters existed in different hands. But this loses sight of four important considerations:

First, few people who possess all Paul's letters make use of all of them in a single letter or group of letters II Thessalonians and Philemon, for example. It would be manifestly wrong to infer from the fact that you or I do not quote these writings that we did not possess them but used a collection of Paul's letters from which they were absent.

Second, the theory makes it necessary to suppose that there were four or five different collections of Paul's letters in circulation about the close of the first century.

Third, the Revelation, the earliest book to reflect them, reflects a collection of letters to seven churches, preceded by a general letter to all seven; which makes it extremely likely that the writer had all ten of the letters in the collection known at Ephesus, for it consisted of a general letter and letters to seven churches.

Fourth, Ephesians, which was from the beginning in the collection (for it was used in I Clement, as Bishop Lightfoot long ago saw), shows unmistakable acquaintance with all nine of the accepted letters Romans, I and II Corinthians, Galatians, I and II Thessalonians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon. The table appended to my Meaning of Ephesians will, I think, satisfy the reader of this fact. [1] When this is

[1] In opposition to this it has been argued that Ephesians was simply using the customary paraenetic language of its day; but if that is true, why does it stand alone in this? It is the only work of pre-Catholic Christian literature for which such a showing of Pauline parallels (The Meaning of Ephesians, pp. 85-112) can be made. The same thing was later crudely done on a smaller scale in the spurious Laodiceans, a jumble of Pauline expressions with no coherent sense.

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once recognized, all the subsequent uses of the Pauline letters fall into natural relations. We have only one collection of Pauline letters to postulate and explain. The whole matter of the uses of Paul's letters in the Christian writings about the end of the first century and the beginning of the second is cleared up.

It is natural to ask what situation could have precipitated the making of such a collection. It is usually the death of a great man that arouses interest in his work and leads to the publication of his collected letters. But it cannot have been Paul's martyrdom that led to the collecting and publishing of his letters, for in that case the collection would have been in circulation before the writing of any of the gospels, and their nonacquaintance with it would be unaccountable.

The next event that drew marked attention to the figure and work of Paul was the appearance of Luke-Acts with its impressive picture of him and his work for the Greek mission. It was the most imposing Christian literary work that had thus far appeared and must have notably revived interest in Paul as the apostle to the Greeks, the founder of the Greek mission, the martyr to that cause. Acts 20:25, 38. The Pauline interest forms an unmistakable crescendo in the Acts from his introduction in 7:58 to the end. To

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suppose that this ringing glorification of Paul could have had no effect upon early Christian literature is hardly reasonable. We should expect it to have some effect and to have it at once, for in ancient as in modern times a book's best chance of influence is immediately upon its publication, when the public for which it was written and out of which it grew is still alive, and the situation which called it forth is still acute. What could possibly have been added to what Acts says about Paul, except to assemble his letters? But how could anyone have thought of this unless he already knew of some letters of Paul? There is nothing whatever in the Acts to suggest that Paul ever wrote any letters of any particular moment any more than anyone else.

Yet Paul himself had given a hint for the bringing-together of two of his letters when he instructed the Colossians to send his letter to them on to the Laodiceans, and to read the letter that was coming from there. Col. 4:16. These two letters must have been preserved together, either at Colossae or at Laodicea or in both churches. Suppose a man who had been in one or the other of those churches, or who had visited those places and seen those letters, read the glowing account of Paul in the Acts, the most telling and unforgettable account of him that has ever been written. The Book of Acts unrolls before him a whole series of Paul's movements of which he has been unaware. The thought occurs to him: Perhaps some of those churchesRome, Corinth, Galatia, Thessalonica, Philippimay have received letters from Paul and

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may even still possess them. It is a curious and striking fact that the Acts would have guided an Asian collector of Pauline letters to all these churches, but it would never have guided a Roman or Corinthian collector to Colossae or Laodicea, for those places are not mentioned in the Acts. It is therefore extremely probable that Colossians-Laodiceans (=Col.-Philem.) formed the nucleus of the Pauline collection, and doubly so when we remember that Paul himself had been instrumental in getting those two letters together.

A series of considerations thus arises pointing to some Asian center of Christianity, such as Ephesus, as the place where the Pauline corpus was probably first assembled:

1. Colossians-Philemon seems to have been the nucleus of it, for Acts would never have guided the collector to the churches at Colossae and Laodicea, while it would have guided anyone already possessed of Colossians-Philemon to all the other Christian centers represented in the corpus by letters. But Colossians and Philemon were letters written to churches in Asia.

2. The use of so much material from Colossians in Ephesians is most naturally explained if the writer of Ephesians had long known Colossians and pored over it, as he must have done when it was the only considerable Pauline letter he possessed. Almost three-fifths of Colossians is paralleled in Ephesians.

3. Ephesus had become the leading Christian center by A.D. 90, being, as Harnack put it, the second fulcrum

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of Christianity after Antioch. It was the home of the writer of the Revelation, in which the Pauline corpus finds its first literary reflection after Ephesians Revelation, chapters 1-3.

4. Ephesus a few years later witnessed (and probably stimulated) the writing and collecting of the letters of Ignatius, another collection of letters conditioned by the Pauline corpus.

5. At about the same time Ephesus witnessed the writing of the Gospel of John, a work strongly influenced by the Pauline corpus.

6. It also produced the Johannine letter-corpus for missionary and apologetic purposes, I, II, and III John.

7. It also in all probability produced the fourfold gospel collection, ca. A.D. 120, to promote the circulation and influence of the new Gospel of John.

8. The fact that the collectors of the letters had Phoebe's letter of introduction (Rom., chap. 16) points to Ephesus, where as we have seen she was probably going, and where the letter might be preserved as a souvenir of Paul and unobtrusively worked into the collection when it was afterward made. It would be difficult to explain its presence anywhere else.

9. It is a perplexing fact that Ignatius writes to the Ephesians, chapter 13, that Paul in every letter "mentions them" or "calls them to mind." [1] He certainly does not "mention" them in anything like every

[1] mnhmoneuei.

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letter. But if the Ephesian church had published the Pauline letters, the difficulty disappears. For in Ignatius' day every letter of Paul would bring to the reader's mind the Ephesians as the collectors and publishers of his letters. The Ephesians would understand the gracious allusion.

Not only did the publication of the Pauline corpus so revive interest in the letter as an important form for Christian instruction, and thus call forth a shower of church lettersRevelation, Hebrews, I Clement, I Peter, Ignatius, Polycarp, etc.but it led to the production and circulation of other corpuses of letters.

The ancients were familiar with published letter collections. There was the Plato letter collection of thirteen letters. There were the letters of Aristotle and Epicurus. The letters of Apollonius of Tyana were soon after collected and circulated. In Latin there were the letters of Cicero, from the middle of the first century before Christ, and early in the second century A.D. Pliny published his own letters, dedicating the collection to his friend Septicius who, he said, had often urged him to collect and publish his letters: "Frequenter hortatus es ut epistulas, si quas accuratius scripsissem, colligerem publicaremque," i. 1.

It is striking that, after the Pauline corpus, there followed in Christian circles the letter corpus of the Revelation, chapters 1-3 (letters to seven churches, preceded by a general letter to all seven); the Ignatian corpus of seven letters, six to churches and one to an individual, A.D. 107-17; the Johannine corpusfor

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the organization of that collection, with one general letter, one church letter, and one personal letter at once suggests that it was written as a unit, and the brevity and comparative slightness of II and III John make it most unlikely that they would have been preserved and circulated by themselves; and the Pastoral corpus, written as a corpus and circulated as part of the enlarged Pauline corpus into which it was at once incorporated. For all these corpuses the Pauline is the great precedent and model, and to all of them it is in a sense the key.

We must therefore no longer treat the several units of these various corpuses atomistically; they must be studied as corpuses if they are to be historically understood, for they originated not as separate units but as full-fledged collections. This is recognized in the case of the Revelation corpus, and it must be recognized in the case of the Johannine and the Pastoral corpuses as well.

In one other respect the collection and publication of the Pauline corpus are of great significance for subsequent Christian literature. It was the beginning of the publication of Christian letters, and Christian letters were thereafter often written for publication. That is, the publication of Paul's letters with the new encyclical "Ephesians" at their head led directly to the Christian epistleHebrews, I Peter, I John, James (originally a sermon but published as an encyclical epistle), etc.

In all these ways the Pauline corpus has important significance for New Testament Introduction. A new

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literary atmosphere now pervades the Christian movement. From this time on all its writing is done in the presence of the Pauline corpus.